The world of Virginie Barré identifies itself as a cinematographic universe somewherebetween fiction and reality. She elaborates this intermediary zone by sampling her subjects or, more precisely, her actors, from film noir, comics and clips that develop the imagery of crimeand thrillers. With her characterful or ordinary figures, she recomposes a world, a sample of the world, as if making its photofit portrait, and attributes a new role to each player in her script. Her work reads in extracts and fragments, like an enigma that we can solve only if we follow the traces and clues brought together in her images. Her approach could be seen as a process of reanimation or recreation of the imaginary, in that it awakens inanimate figures in order to give them a new pictorial or sculptural existence. She stages and re-stages and provokesspectators with installations that are more real than reality, with the illusions of posture and effects of scale.1

Some ten years after Les soeurs Katz, the sculptures made by the artist during a residencyin New York (ISCP) in 2002, one of which referred to a scene in François Truffaut’s film Pocket Money, here Virginie Barré proposes two sculptures that face each other: two children, she says, plotting, inventing a secret game. Mirroring each other, they same to be playing with each other’s reflections. Their clothes are identical and hard to date (boots, waterproofs), the kind of thing one might see in a Nicolas Roeg film of the 1960s. The title refers to Jean and Joan Corbett, two American actresses and twins who worked in the 1950s. Jean, for example, was Kim Novak’s understudy in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

What makes Jean Dupuy’s work singular is the anagrammatic structure that he has elaborated, in which he connects his works with his own life. These works are immaterial, poetic, pictorial, autobiographical, handsomely simple and clear, whole, intuitive, empirical, laborious and figurative. This is work to be closely observed, in the detail of its ordinary/sublimepoetry, and from a distance, as a whole like watching Monsieur Hulot through Raymond Roussel’s telescope.2

“I don’t know when I found this anacycle: OH ! CET EGO – O ! GET ECHO, or when I had the idea of making an object that I call ANACLYCLE and sign as “D. Anacycliste”. An anacycle is a word or a sentence that can be read in both directions but which, contrary to the palindrome, changes meaning. The anacycle is a cycle for one person which can move in one direction or the opposite direction without being able to tire: it has two handlebars, two saddles (facing each other), two sets of pedals, two sets of brakes and two bells which make different sounds, which makes this cycle more anacyclical than palindromic.”3

Better known for his “Cobra” paintings (he founded the group in 1948 with Constant, Appel, and Dotremont), in his bronze and, above all, marble sculptures from 1972 Danish artistAsger Jorn recaptures his characteristic physical power. Kneading and manipulating matter,massaging forms, he puts into the act of making the same kind of energy as he put into his paintings. He “flirts” with figuration but retains only the tormented appearance of matter hashed and ground to the verge of formlessness, yet in spite of that from the compact mass of the marble or the frozen fluidity of the bronze there still emerges, as if at the last gasp, the idea of a bust. These sculptures were little shown during Jorn’s lifetime, and now reveal another aspectof the multifaceted oeuvre of this artist who also created the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus in 1954 and was a member of the Situationist International form 1957 to 1961.1

Tony MatelliBorn 1971 in Chicago, United States.Yesterday, 2009Polychrome bronze, beer can; 37 3/4 x 8 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches and 205/8 x 6 1/4 x 8 11/16 inchesThe Idiot, 2011Stainless steel, paint; 11 x 8 x 20 inches each.Matelli’s work thrives on dualities. He engages both the real and the imagined, both the personal and the political. Like floating coins in a bucket of water, all of Matelli’s work embracesthe simplicity, sometimes absurdity of everyday, questioning the social order, while relishingthe magic.2

Conceived as an outdoor piece The Idiot is a bronze sculpture of an old Budweiser beer box mounted on the wall. Possibly a leftover from a drunken night, the box with two punchedholes suggests a provisional head or effigy. A town drunk. The village idiot. Emptied of its original contents, Matelli has made this hollow head home to birds, who live, eat and shit within it. Flying in and out of the eyes of The Idiot and through the gallery, the birds function as visual thought bubbles.

The gallery is no longer filled with empty space--dead space--it is now filled with Idiot space.3In his sculptures entitled Yesterday, Matelli renders elaborate structures from playing cards, beer cans, cold pizza and cigarette butts. These monuments to wasted time appear perpetuallyverged on total collapse, their attraction a result of their seemingly built-in failure. Composed of polychrome bronze, Yesterday is a kind of cairn to the future, a testament to the pursuance of catastrophe.4

Wrestling with the flux of images that invades our modern lives and our memories, Bruno Peinado uses methods of inversion and visual and linguistic approximation (including the irresistible Lost-it Note and Wild Disney pieces), to subject those images to a bracing processof mental “infusion” that spreads forgetting, confusion and doubt.

As in Low Revolution 3, which he showed at PS1 in New York in 2002, Peinado’s practice concentrates on “mutant” installations that combine drawing, painting, (highly) assisted readymades and elements of interior decoration (carpet, furniture), and whose overall impact serves as a framework for powerfully evocative emblematic works, such as the Afro Michelin man doing the Black Panther raised fist salute (The Big One World, 2000), which quickly became the emblem of “postcolonial multiculturalism without complexes and without exoticism”.

“The man is the only creature on earth provided with consciousness. Therefore each of us perceive that his life has started with birth and will end definitely with death (animals do not know past or future, they live permanent in the present). This basic knowledge brings up all questions, which world-religions try to answer. But this also means, that ‘God’ is a mental construction of our brains. ‘God’ inhabits the temporal world and not the hereafter”.1Werner Reiterer’s works walk a fine line between sense and nonsense, exploiting art’s close proximity to life as a means of challenging literal descriptions of reality. In a manner that blurs the boundaries of art and humor, his richly engaging sculptures ask us to participate in their realization while his drawings disturb our expectations of the ordinary in imaginings of absurd proportion. And by scrambling the relationship of images and language he is able to turn our perceptions upside down and, in ways that are both entertaining and illuminating, reassert the power of art to change our lives.2

Before she settled in Paris in 1963, Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) had already enjoyed success in Poland with monumental sculptures evoking her personal experiences and with other abstract and figurative sculptures. [...] Her representations of the female body are complex and often disturbing, since they reflect her experience as a deportee in the Second World War, and also her struggle with the cancer that greatly weakened her before it eventuallykilled her. And yet, despite this, her art remains tremendously life-affirming, and has what Pierre Restany called “that indefinable quality of a detached humour, that strange serenity of eroticism.” Alina Szapocznikow’s work has only recently become internationally known, and is now compared to other artists of her generation, such as Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois.3

“The experience of walking changes our relation to time and space. Here, in the ‘non-house,’ slowness is the norm. The steps give us a chance to observe the tree from every angle. The steps are 30 cm high, which implies that the walker will develop a method of ascending that is different from the way he negotiates a usual staircase; the height of these steps is closerto the height of the steps in a Mayan temple. The body is forced to make bigger movements, and consequently to breathe more deeply. These effects on the body very subtly put the walker in relation with the nature around (tree-lung).The walker-viewer becomes part of the double structure of architecture/trees. This ‘non-house’is like the forest itself: at once open and closed, difficult to take in with the gaze and repetitive.We can’t see where it ends.”